Did I ever tell you about my first optical enginsering project? It was a video projector which used many innovative ideas, including one of the first liquid crystal video displays. It was dssigned to be the brightest projector ever made and was used in a helmet mounted display prototype. My first job out of college was to gather the parts, put it together, and measure its characteristics. To make a long story short, I had to turn the room lights out to see the image! What made a 20,000-footlambert design into a 20- footlambert display? Illumination! I learned a lot about illumination in those few short weeks, and everything I learned is directly applicable to microscopes. In fact the whole science of illumination was developed by microscapists. Electron microscopes deal with exactly the same concepts.